🇪🇺🪨 The future of biochar carbon removal (hashtag#BCR) in Europe 🪨🇪🇺

Today, the European Commission held a long-awaited workshop focused fully on BCR and its role within the Carbon Removal Certification Framework (hashtag#CRCF) and broader EU climate policy.

👀 Why BCR? According to CDR.fyi it accounted for 81% of total durable CDR sales and 91% of all deliveries in Q1 2024 (93% in all of 2023, and 87% in 2022). The recent State of CDR further reported deliveries of 790,000t of BCR in 2023. BCR is the most readily available, durable CDR method available to us today.

The workshop built on the excellent BCR Technical Scoping Paper prepared by Chris Malins and the team Cerulogy. It was an insightful and well-attended session. Here are my key takeaways:

📜 CRCF: BCR now sits squarely in the permanent removals category. Discussions from the early days on inclusion in carbon farming have finally been put to rest.

🔒 Permanence: speakers Hamed Sanei and Cecilia Sundberg were in agreement that IPCC’s decay function for biochar is simply outdated and a future methodology needs to reflect current scientific evidence around the high permanence of (intertinite) biochar, likely with a combination of H/C ratio and reflectance rate testing.

💡 Standards: BCR already has five standards to ensure production and use lead to genuine, sustainable carbon removal. As Carbonfuture’s Anna J. LEHNER stressed: the focus needs to shift to harmonisation and embedding these into a robust, scaleable monitoring, reporting, and verification (hashtag#MRV) system.

➕ Additionality: Amalie Tokkesdal from the Danish Government highlighted that their assessment shows 100% of BCR in Denmark will be additional. Carbon finance is simply the only way to scale BCR to climate-relevant scale

🔥 Overall, the momentum behind BCR is tangible, both at the global level and now increasingly within EU CDR policy discussions. And rightly so! If anything, I would argue BCR deserves a much larger role than it currently has. I am glad to see so much interest and work going into this highly-scaleable, durable CDR method.

📅 So where do we go from here? Chris and his team will now take all the input from the workshop and develop a strawman paper for the next Expert Group meeting this October, to then develop a draft methodology by April 2025, all on track to have BCR CRCF units ready to go in 2026.

👏 Huge shout-out to the tireless work on the CRCF by the team at DG Clima around Christian Holzleitner, Fabien Ramos, and Andrea Klaric.

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